Very High Water Efficiency Question

[D-Scythe]

How come the reflections of objects on the water when the option is set to "Very High" are always rendered within the visibility cone, no matter what the range is? Here's a screen to illustrate:

 

 

I used CTRL* to zoom in from long-range, or the ship would be hardly a few pixels at that distance. Yet, as you can see, the reflections are still being rendered, despite the fact that the player could barely see it (you can see the visibility bubble limit in the screen).

 

This isn't bad if it was just ships, but it isn't. On Very High water, cities and landscape is also reflected off the water. So my thinking is that if the reflections are always rendered, than the reflection of every single building in a coastal city would likewise also be rendered, which would explain to some extent why my FPS is usually halved whenever I approach a city or port (even though I cannot really see the buildings or their reflections).

 

So my question is, can rendering of the reflections of buildings off the water be removed on the Very High setting? It's very taxing on the computer as it is currently.